Blue-collar workers are shifting left while the unemployed are moving to the center of the political spectrum.

That is a critical trend among Italy’s electorate, uncovered in a little-noticed study done last year by CISE, the Italian Electoral Studies Center, a research division in Rome’s Luiss University.

CISE asked 1,524 voters last spring and again late last year where they placed themselves on the political spectrum. All in all, the study’s lead author Nicola Maggini acknowledged, there’s not much change, reflecting what is widely seen as a strong loyalty tradition among Italian voters.

A third of Italians identify themselves with the left, just under 30% with the right, a quarter with the center and one in seven declare themselves unaligned, the survey found.

But the study went further, breaking down the sample by their economic status, and there a notable shift emerged that in many ways testifies to the impact of the technocratic government led by Mario Monti in 2012.

By the end of the year, 31.3% of blue-collar workers placed themselves on the left, up from 22.4% in the spring. Meanwhile, those identifying themselves with the center – an area that is rallying around Mr. Monti ahead of the February general elections – declined to 23.2% from 27.2%. Interestingly, a plurality of 34.5% still identify with the right, down from 37.2% earlier in the year.

Mr. Monti overhauled labor laws, making it easier to fire workers and shortening unemployment benefits for those who lose their jobs, and openly praised Fiat Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne, seen by many as a hard-headed enemy of Italy’s working-class culture, so it’s not a big surprise to see voters in this category move away from his political area.

But Italy’s existing labor-market rules are widely seen as safeguarding existing jobs at the cost of creating new ones.

Indeed, both public and private-sector employees in CISE’s poll shifted left and most of them did so in a pivot away from the center — and interestingly, private-sector workers moved left and public-sector ones moved right.

In that light, it’s fascinating to note that CISE uncovered a huge move to the center among the unemployed, whose identification with the political center more than doubled to 39.7% from 19.3% over the course of Mr. Monti’s government.

The bulk of that shift represented an exodus from the left, whose share of this piece of the electorate dedclined to 16.2% from 29.7%.

The poll lends support to Mr. Monti’s claim, made in a campaign appearance this week, that he aspires to represent the “excluded.”

On the other hand, the CISE poll noted trends that question such a claim. “Bourgeois” respondents, for example, flocked to the center from both the right and the left, and so did retirees, who under Italy’s current pension scheme are receiving far more in benefits than they paid in during their working lives.